Thoughts on Life, Love, Politics, Hypocrisy and Coming Out in Mid-Life

Sunday, April 10, 2016

The GOP’s Transformation to the Party of Stupid

As the Republican Party has descended into the party of stupid, where ignorance, racism, religious extremism and a fear of modernity are now the defining elements of the GOP base, there have been many post mortems on how a party that once honored knowledge, learning, and intelligence has become the party of uneducated, angry white males, white supremacists, and religious fanatics. A piece in Salon does a good job in outlining this descent into stupidity. Here are excerpts:

The top leadership of the
Republican Party expresses horror at the popularity of Donald Trump as though
his positions and values are somehow alien from their own. This is
disingenuous. As other commentators have observed, the presidential candidacy
of the bigoted, misogynist, ignorant Trump is a creature of the party’s own
making.

This Frankentrump was not fashioned in a mere eight years,
however. . . . . Instead, the transformation of the Republican base
from the conscience-driven party of Lincoln to the anger-driven party of Trump
has been a half-century in the making.

[T]he
founding Republican philosophy was liberal. . . . . To be liberal in the nineteenth century meant to be
devoted to freedom of thought above all. Above tradition, the American liberals
who helped found the Republican Party valued the freedom to choose what is
right and the freedom to develop socially, intellectually, and morally toward
the highest possible potential. This is why liberals favored public schools for
all children, which started in Massachusetts in the 1830s and only got
established in the South thanks to Reconstruction.

The liberal principle of “moral agency,” as they called
this divine right and duty to choose, also lay behind Republican opposition to
slavery. . . . . The liberal moral ethic centered on independent,
open-ended thinking, constructive dialogue across differences, and a belief in
the divine potential of every human being. Even slaves. . . . . This got
the Republican Party boycotted in the (white) South, not only during the years
of the Confederate rebellion but long after.

The
Democrats ran the party of white supremacy.. . . . The Republican
President Dwight D. Eisenhower is the leader who submitted civil-rights
legislation to Congress to combat Jim Crow in 1957. It was Democrats in
Congress who watered the bill down.

The partisan poles of the
United States changed after the dramatic activism of the 1950s and early ‘60s
prompted the Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson to sign the Civil Rights
Act of 1964, sending white Southern and white working-class Democrats into
Republican arms.

The Republican wooing of these voters took time and
delicacy. Never did its strategists aim to become the party of blatant racism.
Instead, they created concepts like the “moral majority,” “religious right,”
“family values” and even color-blindness in order to attract white voters
concerned about African-American socio-economic and political gains. And in so
doing, they betrayed their moral roots in three ways.

First,
Republicans allowed bigotry safe haven under the guise of morality, in the very
name of morality, by broadcasting scary tales of black urban life as though it
were proof of the irredeemable inferiority of African Americans. From the
Southern Strategy of Nixon to the cynical electioneering of Lee Atwater, the
campaign manager for George H. W. Bush, the line was straight. In 1981, Atwater
explained that by 1968, the N-word repelled voters rather than attracting them,
so he trained Republicans to “say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and
all that stuff.” Reagan acted his part in disdaining welfare queens and “young
bucks,” a phrase straight out of the antebellum South.

Second,
the Republican Party adopted fixed positions on issues. The nineteenth-century
liberal commitment to open-mindedness had meant that any position was only
provisional, awaiting the testimony of further evidence or wider viewpoints for
modification. For many decades now, the Republicans have insisted that lowering
taxes, beefing up the military, and cutting social programs are what America
needs. They oppose abortion because they need white evangelical voters, so
Republican politicians claim that the resemblance of a fetus to a baby is more
important than the resemblance of a criminal to a human being. . . .

Finally,
the Republican Party has increasingly refused to engage in meaningful dialogue
with its opponents. It has betrayed its origins in the culture of learning by
attacking higher education in the United States — the colleges and universities
all too liable to teach young people how to think critically — and by trying to
privatize public education in the names of meritocracy and religious freedom. At
the very least, Republican strategists have undermined public schoolteachers
and pathologized urban schoolchildren. By deploying the language of culture
wars, left versus right and liberal versus conservative, Republican strategists
have fed a polarization allegedly too extreme to tolerate constructive dialogue
toward consensus.

To echo
the words of Malcolm X in 1963, the Trump candidacy is as clear a case of
chickens coming home to roost as ever history did see.

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Out gay attorney in a committed relationship; formerly married and father of three wonderful children; sometime activist and political/news junkie; survived coming out in mid-life and hope to share my experiences and reflections with others.
In the career/professional realm, I am affiliated with Caplan & Associates PC where I practice in the areas of real estate, estate planning (Wills, Trusts, Advanced Medical Directives, Financial Powers of Attorney, Durable Medical Powers of Attorney); business law and commercial transactions; formation of corporations and limited liability companies and legal services to the gay, lesbian and transgender community, including birth certificate amendment.

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